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Esoto: Where Girls and Warriors Meet the Changing Space and Perceptions of Esoto Over Generations of the Maasai Women of Engare Sero Lisa Wilmore SIT Study Abroad

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Esoto: Where Girls and Warriors Meet the Changing Space and Perceptions of Esoto Over Generations of the Maasai Women of Engare Sero Lisa Wilmore SIT Study Abroad SIT Graduate Institute/SIT Study Abroad SIT Digital Collections Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection SIT Study Abroad Fall 2010 Esoto: Where Girls and Warriors Meet The Changing Space and Perceptions of Esoto Over Generations of the Maasai Women of Engare Sero Lisa Wilmore SIT Study Abroad Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcollections.sit.edu/isp_collection Part of the African Languages and Societies Commons, Dance Commons, and the Social and Cultural Anthropology Commons Recommended Citation Wilmore, Lisa, "Esoto: Where Girls and Warriors Meet The hC anging Space and Perceptions of Esoto Over Generations of the Maasai Women of Engare Sero" (2010). Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection. 900. https://digitalcollections.sit.edu/isp_collection/900 This Unpublished Paper is brought to you for free and open access by the SIT Study Abroad at SIT Digital Collections. It has been accepted for inclusion in Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection by an authorized administrator of SIT Digital Collections. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Esoto: where girls and warriors meet The changing space and perceptions of esoto over generations of the Maasai women of Engare Sero by Lisa Wilmore SIT Tanzania: Political Ecology and Wildlife Conservation Fall 2010 Acknowledgements I must first express my thanks to the Engare Sero community who welcomed Team Natron into a place that we have all come to love after our three-week stay. Your generosity and friendship made our experience memorable. Thank you to all of the women for your graceful cooperation in the heat of a typical Engare Sero day. Your interest, sincerity, and laughter gave my project life from the first day. Thank you to my translator, Luca, as well as Leparah, Marco, Daudi, and Roco for approaching our interviews with sensitivity and smiles, for your guidance through the desert, and for your friendship. Thank you, Baba Jack, for constantly challenging our positions of power and privilege and for giving us mobility in a very foreign place—I have learned so much. I also must include special thanks to Adrienne Rosenberg, a former SIT Tanzania student who, though I have never met her, wrote the ISP that inspired me to join this program in hopes of conducting a study that may have the same affect on someone else. Finally, this experience would not have been nearly as weird or fun without all of Team Natron. So thank you Ali, Miriam, Sam, and Katie for all of the rich conversations and moral support—it was an unforgettable trip. 2 Abstract The purpose of this study is to document the changing space of the esoto dance of the Maasai through descriptive analysis. I will consider how performance, relationships, and life after esoto have changed generationally. I will also analyze why these changes are occurring with a discussion on women’s opinions of the esoto. I chose the study site of Engare Sero as it has recently commenced a new age of development with a primary school, tourism, and the mixing of other Tanzanians. I interviewed exactly 105 women in the village within a 5km radius from the village center. I spoke mostly with older women and only briefly chatted with girls in the town market. Through analysis I have found the three factors that I believe are causing the changing space and perceptions of esoto to be western education, Christianity, and Swahili culture. While all women agreed that the esoto has changed in some ways since they were young, they had differing opinions on the relevance of the dance today. The western principles that are applied through these three factors have come to modify Maasai values, concepts of morality, and priorities in their developing world. 3 Table of Contents Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………………………………ii Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….iii Table of Contents……………………………………………………………………………………………….iv Introduction…………………….…………………………………………………………………………………1 Study Site……………………………………………………………………………………………………………4 Methods……………………………………………………………………………………………………………...6 Results………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..7 Discussion………………………………………………………………………………………………………….17 Limitations and Recommendations……………………………………………………………………..26 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………………………………27 Citations…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….28 Appendix A: Map of the Greater Serengeti Mara Complex Appendix B: Focal Group Questions for Yeyos, Kokos, and Ndito 4 Introduction Cultural spaces all over the world define and transform peoples’ customs, agency, and daily experiences. As we find these spaces of self-identification overlapping, traversing, and adjoining to one another it is a science of mercurial adaptation that allows us to transition. What comes to question when considering these spaces is to what extent we shape the space in relation to how much it shapes us. Space is ultimately void without the existence of people who negotiate its terms of being and purpose in reality. These cultural constructions also have the uncanny ability to give and take agency, re negotiate social convention, and trump individual sentiment. As you walk out of your room, down the hallway, out the door, and onto the street your meticulously fashioned spaces construct, exist, and collapse with every step. In so many ways these human-manifested realities are true from the global community all the way to an individual in the company of no others, bringing theories such as John Locke’s state of nature to moot conclusions. These spaces have, in fact, become so removed from our conscious selves that we are seldom to question their fundamental roots and how they manifest in our interactions with one another. I have been in Tanzania for over two months now and have been witness to the cultural establishments. One of the most intriguing dynamics to observe is the difference in spaces that are uniquely male, uniquely female, and overlapping and how behavior changes accordingly. My Bangatan homestay gave me the most time in one community to synthesize these observations. One of the most striking comments that I heard during our focal groups in Bangata was spoken during an all-women’s focal group. When asked about their perception of western women, they said that western women seem smarter than Tanzanian women and that we seem older than our actual age (Focal Group 2. Bangata, Tanzania). I was deeply disturbed by this comment and still can’t seem to shake the sentiment out of my mind. That they have somehow come to the 5 conclusion of mzungu 1 women being inherently smarter than they are may be a symptom of some greater global pressures. After this comment I became increasingly attentive to tonal changes as the women in my Bangatan host family traversed from spaces of greater to lesser agency with such fluidity. With Tanzania being the home of over 120 ethnic groups it is a difficult process to generalize cultural spaces for all of Tanzania. Conceivably, the cultural practices that seem such the antithesis to the west are those of the Maasai. Immigrating south into East Africa some 250 to 500 years ago, the Maasai have held onto a tightly knit, homogenous set of cultural practices. 2 Even in the face of adversity and pressure from the Tanzanian government, their practices have mostly survived into the 21 st century. Age sets organize the Maasai society by events that a westerner may call rights of passage. These age-sets differ between men and women, as there are more for men than women. Men transition from boys, warriors ( morani), junior elders, senior elders, and finally to elders. These five age-sets are distinguished by various ceremonies and move simultaneously when the laibon, one of the elders, deems the appropriate time. Women move through 3 age-sets including uncircumcised girls (ndito ), circumcised mamas ( yeyo ), and grandmothers ( koko ). Interaction between the various age-sets of women and men is strictly followed as morani are free to have sex with uncircumcised girls but junior elders (essentially young married men) may only have sex with circumcised women (Rosenberg, 2009). It is common practice among the sexually active age sets to have multiple lovers or, friends , as the Maasai say. Morani and ndito exclusively exist within the esoto 3, a social dance of the Maasai where morani (ranging from the age of puberty: 13, to 27) dance and sing with lovers, a group of girls 6 to 15 years old. 2 Before the dance, which starts around 10 in the evening, a girl will dress herself in elaborate jewelry including a white disk some 4 inches in radius that clasps tightly around her neck as well as 1 Mzungu is the Kiswahili term for white person. 2 Personal Communication, Babu Liki, October 2010 3 Esoto specifically means the place where warriors and girls meet. 6 other necklaces, bracelets, anklets and hats. A girl will have many morani friends during her years attending the esoto but will choose her first and most important friend, olokoingipoto, to give the cream of milk to. This gesture signifies a bond between the girl and her olokoingipoto . The esoto is an important space and time of agency in the totality of a woman’s life as it is the only time when she may have sex uncircumcised and is expected to have several partners. Uncircumcised girls are, on one hand, burdened with reproductive duties to prepare for motherhood but are also “granted a great deal of personal freedom. The young girls from one or more settlements form a group which is independent of the adults and has it’s own rules of behavior” (Von Mitzlaff, 1988). Although a married woman is expected to have sex only with her husband, this rule is commonly broken for their esoto lovers (Von Mitzlaff, 1988). It is seemingly a time when sex is most pleasurable and the community monitors relationships to a lesser extent. As tourism continues to introduce the Maasai to differing customs and cultural spaces, Maasai women’s views on esoto customs continue to change. The most influential forces are the introductions of Christianity, western education, and Swahili culture to the Engare Sero community.
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